Posts published by Michael A. Wilner

Pins mark the locations of Goucher College students who were studying abroad in 2005, when the college announced that all students had to study abroad.Credit Steve Ruark for The New York Times

Katie Anne Scott was the only one of her friends to leave California for college. None of them understood her desire to leave, with so many terrific options for college in her home state. And yet to Ms. Scott, from San Diego, that was just the point. Staying in California meant she would not experience anything new.

After enrolling at Emory University in Atlanta and accommodating to the South, where the car culture and the demographics were radically different, Ms. Scott found herself applying similar logic to her options for study abroad.

“I might not have gone to Ghana if Emory hadn’t geared me for it,” Ms. Scott said during a Skype interview earlier this year from her adopted African home. “I just have one suitcase here, and that’s fine. But most of my friends here don’t have that experience, so it’s definitely been easier for me. Ultimately, it’s still just a plane ride.”

Ms. Scott is just the type of student of interest among advisers for studying abroad who are trying to figure out why sophomores and juniors choose to study where they do. While these advisers need to know how best to organize their annual budgets and which programs to finance or cut, many colleges are also busy strategizing how to effectively motivate students not just to go abroad, but also to choose developing countries — with emerging markets and less familiar cultures — as their destinations.

The correlation between going far from home for college and studying abroad in more challenging countries has not been studied closely, experts acknowledge, but more general indications of comfort level often prove determinative.Read more…

When Yaser S. Abu-Mostafa, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the California Institute of Technology, began promoting his online course on machine learning, one person he turned to was Caltech’s dean of admissions. Dr. Abu-Mostafa believed that prospective Caltech students would benefit from learning what it actually takes to be an engineer — something that high schools, on the whole, fail to teach adequately.

National Science Foundation statistics lend credence to his worries: while one in 10 students in the United States enter college with the intention of majoring in engineering, nearly half of those students fail to complete their degree requirements.

“University is a mystery to these students, and they really don’t know what they’re getting into a lot of the time,” said Dr. Abu-Mostafa, whose course ultimately attracted 100,000 subscribers. He estimates that one in 10 were in high school, based on the number of e-mails he received from different age groups.

“The class crystallized their interests,” he said, “and gave them some confidence going into the field.”

Now, in what seems to be the first major effort by a university to tailor a massive open online course, or MOOC, specifically to high school students, Brown University is preparing to offer a free online engineering class with the aim of teaching high school students about the merits and challenges of the field.

If the program is truly unprecedented, as Brown’s team has come to believe, it could start a trend of directly advising high school students and their teachers on specific curriculums, motivated in part by the hypercompetitive college admissions process.Read more…

For all the gripes some people have with the SAT and ACT as gauges of aptitude, the tests are certainly standardizing forces in one regard: taking them has become a shared moment of anxiety — a rite of passage, in its way — for students wishing to go to a United States college or university.

Yet some students defy this rule. The list of colleges and universities dropping the admissions requirement of standardized test scores continues to extend each year, and with it, a growing number of prospective applicants are treating the testing process as an optional exercise.

If you are a student who wants to opt out of the standardized testing game, you now have two alternatives: you can withhold your scores from test-optional institutions, or you can apply exclusively to schools on this growing list, dropping out of the testing process entirely. Fairtest.org, a standardized testing watchdog, points out that more than a quarter of all American colleges and universities are now test-optional in some form.Read more…

A screenshot of an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, in an introductory video to his online course on the Coursera Web site.Credit Ramin Rahimian for The New York Times

Michael A. Wilner received a bachelor’s degree from Claremont McKenna College and a master’s in journalism from Columbia University. He is a contributor to The Choice.

Michael Zhang took eight courses this semester at Smithtown High School East on Long Island, including three Advanced Placement courses. In years past, that would be a sign that Mr. Zhang, 18, is capable of taking on academics at the college level.

But as if to quell any doubters, Mr. Zhang has gone the extra mile. He has completed two Coursera online courses. He has enrolled in more than 20.

Mr. Zhang lists his completed Coursera coursework near the top of his résumé, next to his high school, and recognizes its cachet for him as a prospective applicant. But he says one of the most unexpected rewards of taking massive open online courses — or MOOCs — was getting a feel for what each school has to offer.Read more…